Phillis Wheatley

Although George Washington met her only once for a period of around half an hour, the kindness and respect that he showed toward Phillis Wheatley, a female African slave, serves as a telling example of his moral complexity and capacity for humanitarian understanding.

The name of the young girl who became known as Phillis Wheatley was formed from a combination of the name of the slave ship that brought her to Boston from West Africa at the age of seven, the Phillis, and the surname of the family who purchased her. Compared to most slave owners, John and Susanna Wheatley were strikingly compassionate. They allowed their eighteen-year-old daughter Mary to begin tutoring the young Phillis in Greek, Latin, poetry, and other subjects.

Eventually Wheatley's owners began to see such great potential in her intellectual development that they excused her from household duties and allowed her to focus on her studies. The level of education that Wheatley reached, although she was never formally schooled, was unique not only for a slave but also for many women at the time. She began to write poetry as early as twelve years of age and gained international recognition in 1771 with the publication of an elegy commemorating the death of a preacher named George Whitefield.

In December of 1775, Washington–the newly appointed Commander-in-Chief of the Continental Army–received a letter from Wheatley containing an ode written in his honor. The poem illustrates Wheatley's somewhat surprisingly passionate patriotic sentiment, which factors strongly in much of her poetry. It ends with a stanza reading: "Proceed, great chief, with virtue on thy side, / Thy ev’ry action let the goddess guide. / A crown, a mansion, and a throne that shine, / With gold unfading, WASHINGTON! Be thine."

Washington expressed his appreciation for the poem and even considered publishing it, but he feared that it could be interpreted as self-aggrandizing. He did, however, respond with a letter—the only known letter that he ever wrote to a slave—addressed to "Miss Phillis," which was an unusually polite way for a member of the gentry to address a slave. Washington extended an invitation for Wheatley to call on him at his headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In March of 1776, Washington courteously received Wheatley's visit. Considering that Washington was a slave owner himself, his welcoming reception of Wheatley was somewhat contradictory. Consequently, the account of their meeting has endured as an early instance of the progression of racial tolerance and understanding in antebellum America.

While Washington went on to lead the Continental Army to an unlikely victory over the British, unfortunately the devastating social and economic effects of the war vastly diminished popular demand for poetry. Despite being legally freed from bondage in 1778, marrying a free black grocer named John Peters, and continuing to write poetry, Wheatley fell into poverty in the final years of her life and died tragically on December 5, 1784. Although her poetry never brought her great wealth, its legacy persisted after her death as a profound demonstration of African American knowledge, humanity, and achievement.